More on my fiction writing

January 21, 2010

Difficult days ahead

Despite all the progressive wishing away, the election of a doctrinaire right-wing Republican to Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat is a calamity and a sign of calamities to come. The implications are national and international. Yes, Martha Coakley was a weak candidate who ran an inept campaign. Sure, the economy is bad and the party in power always suffers. And, yeah, the Obama and progressive voters stayed home in large numbers (this is to be comforting?). Meanwhile, the White House, said to be "blindsided" and "in disarray," seems to have interpreted the special election as an excuse to tack even more to "the center," i.e. the right.

We've got difficult days ahead.

Imagine if Franklin Roosevelt had failed in his first term: failed to enact meaningful legislation to immediately address the suffering of Americans and bring some fair play back to the republic; failed to take on, with relish, the "economic royalists"; failed to connect, in a visceral way, with Americans suffering from the Great Depression; failed to be wiley, cagey, downright dishonest in pursuit of his goals; failed to surround himself with a cadre of brilliant, independent, highly competent lieutenants, and failed to be willing to experiment with almost anything but a continuation of the Republican policies that had caused the Depression. Communism was popular, fascism perhaps even more so thanks to the seeming success and popularity of Mussolini. It was especially potent in the hands of populist demagogue Huey Long. The forces of reaction, although in disarray, still commanded great wealth and also had fascist sympathies. "Dictatorship" was a good word at the time.

Now let us consider President Obama. A year in, his presidency is arguably already a failure. Jimmy Carter without the sanctimony. Yes, he inherited the worst economy since Hoover left office, plus two wars. But it's now clear he made 10 critical mistakes:

1. He failed to make the economic circumstances of ordinary Americans his top priority.

2. He brought aboard the Clinton economic team that had helped author the regime of radical deregulation and trade blunders that caused the bubble, the crash, the loss of millions of jobs, a decade of wage stagnation and the slow collapse of the old American middle class.

3. He failed to immediately take control of the bailout. This would have meant, among other things, insisting on accountability and prosecutions; stopping the sweetheart payouts of taxpayer bailout money from AIG to the likes of Goldman Sachs; putting through a 21st century Glass-Steagall Act; breaking up the TBTF banks in an orderly and economically stimulative way, and opening up all the secret deals and "facilities" to public view.

4. He failed to insist on a large enough stimulus package -- at least $1 trillion -- that would be needed to fill the hole the recession was leaving, and spend it in ways that invested heavily in the future productivity of the nation, as well as visibly helping those suffering. Tax cuts were barely stimulative. If it couldn't get through Congress, he should have gone over the heads of the lawmakers to the American people, as Reagan did when he overcame heavy Democratic majorities in Congress in 1981.

5. He was a bystander to health care reform, letting Congress waste a year and get nothing. Instead, the president should have put forward simple, individual proposals that would be highly popular with the American people: make pharma bid for the Medicare drug business; allow reimportation of drugs from Canada; outlaw the ability of insurance companies to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions and other care dodges. This was not the year to go for Medicare-for-all, which should happen, but had Obama succeeded on these individual bills, with their benefits obvious to citizens, the road to single-payer would have been open.

6. He was too slow to withdraw from Iraq and escalated in Afghanistan knowing the regime is corrupt and "victory" is hopeless. This missed a critical opportunity to shift the debate as well as the strategy, making Americans focus on the struggle they face and the changes and sacrifices necessary.

7. He wasted valuable time courting an intransigent Republican opposition committed to, in Sen. Jim DeMint's oh-so-Southern way of putting it, "break him." Worse, he even adopted many of their demented ways of seeing the world, including their sudden worry about the deficit and, especially, "we are at war." Really? With what nation? What, as Churchill might have asked, are our aims? What would "victory" look like considering these terrorist/criminals will never stop, especially since we have fulfilled bin Laden's goal of overreaction and deeper, lethal incursions into Muslim countries, inflaming anti-Americanism. We are "at war"? What sacrifice shall be asked: a draft? A tax on the richest? Gasoline rationing (or tax)?

8. The Bush administration also continued in Obama's Justice Department, where all the alleged crimes and unconstitutional executive overreaching of the previous eight years remain enshrined or lacking a just accounting to the people. Illegal surveillance. Torture. The crimes and war-profiteering of politically connected contractors. Jailing Don Siegelman. Stolen elections. Signing statements. Rendition. Cooked intelligence. A CIA officer exposed for political gain. Frog-walking Cheney and Rove might not happen. But the utter lack of justice being served invites Old Testament-style retribution.

9. President Obama never had it in him to go on the offensive in a sustained, effective way. This is remarkable, given his admiration for Reagan, who was not only a great communicator, but could slit the throats of opponents while making them look forward to the experience and coming off as the nice guy. Reagan blamed Carter for years; Obama took the poisoned chalice and stamped his name on it. The lost opportunity is also remarkable because the colossal failures of the right, the big bankers, big insurance and pharma, and assorted other plutocrats presented such fat, juicy targets. Nor did he use the bully pulpit to get Americans ready for the future of discontinuity. Good lord, George W. Bush talked more about peak oil than his successor. In all this, Obama froze. The result: a vacuum of rhetoric and the framing of issues that was filled by the tea-baggers, the reactionary right and the likes of Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson.

10. Nor did he inspire us with big visions, which also could have provided immediate stimulus to the economy in a big way. I speak of building, now, one or two or ten high-speed rail corridors and all the infrastructure to fit with transit and individual cars, as well as retrofitting suburbia for a higher-energy future. Even if many Americans didn't get the high-speed concept that is so popular in most other advanced nations at first, they would have gotten the jobs. I'm sure there could have been other such projects. Instead, we got studies, status-quo funding on roads to nowhere, relatively slight rail funding that can and will be quickly undone by the Republicans when they come back to power.

He was, of course, assisted in this disaster by a Democratic Party that may well deserve to break apart or spend many more years in the wilderness. With honorable exceptions, the party is riddled with feckless leaders and elected officials who are as bought-and-sold and their Republican counterparts.

I will make this point again: Obama and the Democrats had one chance, two years, to show how a progressive agenda could benefit Americans. Indeed, had it been a real progressive agenda and been enacted with Rooseveltian speed, it would have totally undercut the anger among most people now being leveraged by the tea baggers, the corporate puppet masters and the corporate media, all of whom can count on a country that has lost the literacy that served the republic through most of its history.

Instead, we got nothing or more of the same or worse of the same. This has been easily manipulated in the minds of too many "low information" voters to show how progressives and liberals in government fail. A majority of adult voters have never lived under effective liberal government, even though they thoughtlessly enjoy the remnants of its protections and uplift (think of the South Carolina tea-bagger who screamed, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!"). They don't know history. Even many of the educated have been indoctrinated for decades by the right. The right is "the center." One chance. Blown.

We've got difficult years ahead. The Supreme Court, turned by years of conservative appointees, has now granted transnational corporations even more of the rights designed by the Founders to be for individual persons. So if the plutocracy's power to buy Congress and lobby against anything that doesn't send more wealth to the top has been suffocating for our economy and democracy so far, just wait. This is huge and will last. Most of the federal judiciary is conservative now, many reactionaries of the Federalist Society mold. Just wait. Oh, President Obama has a backlog of judge and U.S. Attorney appointments he's failed to fill.

Meanwhile, the recession that is only the first part of the Great Disruption has been turned to the advantage of the right, whose very unsustainable policies have brought it on. So tax limitation measures are expanding. State governments are being dismembered. Fear and endless military adventures are being used for anti-democratic agendas that will also further destroy the economy. Climate change, the environment...bah! Any effort to actually address the real causes of our situation, much less prepare for the future, is effectively vilified as some stealth "socialism" of the "educated elite." It's a self-reinforcing merry-go-round fueled by ignorance, fear, prejudice and a fool's sense of entitlement that has been so effective in Arizona.

I wish I could offer some hope here. I just can't today. The first step to progress is to see the world as it is, not as we wish it was.

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

My own sense of futility is so overwhelming that I almost want to let the low-information voters experience first-hand the Ayn-Rand idyll they apparently see as a cure for our woes.

I think Obama's fundamental error was a compound of an inappropriate faith in the institutions of this nation along with a naive kind of pragmatism that failed to appreciate the gravity of the current crisis. He's failing because he apparently believed Republicans are less nihilistic than they are. He's also failing because he apparently believed the economy could be fixed without being transformed.

Obama didn't invent the media universe we now live in - the 24 hour news cycle with its incessant Gotcha angles and absurdly simplistic narratives. We thought he was a master here but, in fact, he was merely a amateur trying on Big Themes only to invite our eventual disappointment. Big turned Managerial. Obama was not the Titan but the stage manager. Once he ceded the stage to the banshees, the production fell apart.

My disappointment encloses a lot of anger toward the media magpies who intentionally keep citizens jazzed with idiocies and baubles. How do you combat this toxic nonsense? Maybe Obama thought niceness would eventually rule but that's not what we really want. We want a felt sense that someone is in charge. Obama is a man of many gifts but the one he's lacking is called "command". He shrank when we needed him to grow.

That's a pretty good description of the numerous substantive and procedural ways in which Obama has been a failure. But he's also got his own kind of sanctimony. There will be a huge flood of corporate cash in the 2010 midterms, motivated by a desire to avoid cap and trade and financial regulatory reform, that may well flip Congress. Not only are things going to get ugly, they may get ugly immediately. I frankly don't see any chance now for reversing course, until someday the whole system collapses.

Take a deep breath Jon - your going Kunstler-style political appocalypse in this post.

The GOP peeled off 1 senator. 1. On one hand you are saying Obama wasn't bold enough. On the other, you are saying he was too bold (healthcare). Not using the bully pulpit? The guy has given more speeches in his first year than nearly any president.

Part of what we've learned here might be to question Howard Dean's "50 state strategy" in which electing conservatives under a Democrat brand was tolerated and even pursued. We've learned that a fake supermajority is just that - fake. Dems tapped Bush anger to win elections, but didn't megaphone liberal ideas in the process.

To me, we are still in the same boat we were before the Mass election (exception, healthcare). Nelson and others will still DINOs. Lieberman will still be to the right of Snow and Collins.

Dems will need to either pass bills by 51 and use procedural moves to avoid the filibuster, or try to peel off Snowe and/or Collins. Will we get sweeping liberal reforms? No - but after witnessing our "majority" work on healthcare, that wasn't in the cards anyway.

There is one bright spot (arguably a "big vision") in domestic energy policy. The DOE gave a $100 million grant to a Phoenix based company, Electric Transportation Engineering Corporation (eTec) to install 11,210 electric charging stations for electric cars in 11 cities (including Seattle and Phoenix) in five states. This is more than twice the number of gasoline stations in LA, Chicago, and Houston (and their counties).

Another company receiving grant funds, ECOtality plans to deploy rapid chargers along Interstate 10 between Phoenix and Tucson "to create the nation's first EV corridor and to allow EV users to commute between two major cities."

The same article notes that "Buyers of the first 200,000 plug-in vehicles sold in the U.S. per manufacturer before 2014 will be eligible for a $7,500 federal tax credit. State and local incentives also may be available, including reduced registration charges, lower electricity rates or state tax credits."

Incidentally, to anyone already familiar with this story, I highly recommend a full reading of the Sunpluggers article, as there is a good deal of information about R&D and innovations which did not make it into the mainstream media accounts.

I'm betting that the United States will be switching to electric cars in a big way over the next 15 to 20 years and that innovations in electric car batteries and solar systems along with economies of scale and generous subsidies will make that feasible.

Jon can speak for himself, but I think what he's saying is that Obama failed in large part because he wasn't bold enough. I don't see any too-bold criticism in there, and none seems appropriate. His bold rhetoric was not matched by his policy proposals, which were timid and largely more of the same. Health care, the one exception, was perverted because of the decision to take single player off the table at the outset and the decision to let Congress drift for months. As for the 50-state strategy, frustrating as they are, conservative Dems are at least better than Republicans on certain issues, such as voting for Speaker and Minority Leader. That doens't mean we shouldn't try to replace them with better Democrats via primary challenge.

What is causing so much of the dismay is the fact that the Democrats now clearly don't have a filibuster-proof majority. Perhaps they never did. That could be a blessing in disguise if Reid commits to using reconciliation to the maximum extent possible, in which case the content of legislation is controlled by the 50th-most liberal Senator rather than the 60th. I see no evidence that Reid is prepared to do that, or that Obama is prepared to urge him to do so. It seems likely that the Democrats will wring their hands haplessly until the mid-terms, and then be killed at the polls. Obama's strange passivity has not only made his own presidency something close to a failure, it has discredited liberalism as well -- despite the fact ne never really tried it.

Kevin, the GOP may have "peeled off one Senator," but the end result is far more resounding than that. The Republicans now have a U.S. Senator in Massachusetts for the first time in nearly a half-century, at the same time a Democratic President occupies the White House and when the Democrats hold a majority in both houses of Congress. It's pretty easy to understand why Scott Brown is the junior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts -- Mr. Talton explained this rather eloquently for you -- but if you don't get it, you never will.
Simply put, the Obama presidency has been a colosal failure.

"Jon can speak for himself, but I think what he's saying is that Obama failed in large part because he wasn't bold enough. I don't see any too-bold criticism in there, and none seems appropriate."

I think Kevin was slightly confused by the remark "This was not the year to go for Medicare-for-all, which should happen..."

But Kevin's criticism would only hold had Obama actually promoted such an outcome. In fact, Obama was, in the end, entirely noncommittal to ANY sort of "public option" much less a robust and broad one.

With the exception of legislative proposals by Bernie Sanders, and John Conyers, which were never reported out of committee, the most by way of universal healthcare which was proposed, was an exceedingly weak "public option" which would apply only to a tiny minority of the population (not nearly enough to allow them to collectively bargain or compete with large private insurance companies, for example) -- thus alienating both supporters and opponents of the public option -- and even that was permitted to fail.

It's worth taking a moment to consider the role of congressional committees as gatekeepers of proposed legislation, because much of the lobbying by the FIRE (finance, insurance, and real-estate) sector, which spent more in its efforts last year than either the Energy or Defense lobbyists, is concentrated on influencing, not the general congressman, but the chairs and members of select and influential committees, as well as the Party leadership:

"Committees are like "mini Congresses". Most bills begin by being considered by one or several congressional committees which may "report" the bill favorably or unfavorably to the Senate or House as a whole allowing it to receive consideration by the full body and move forward, or may fail to consider a bill at all preventing the bill from moving forward. Most bills never receive any committee consideration and are never reported out. House bills start in House committees and enter Senate committees only after being passed by the House and received by the Senate, and similarly for Senate bills.

"Information on committee proceedings is notoriously opaque: committees vary in what information they make public and often do not provide basic public information such as the results of votes electronically or in an understandable format. Furthermore, if your Member of Congress does not sit on any committee relevant to this bill, you generally have no opportunity to voice your opinion on the bill while the bill is receiving its most important consideration."

Note that in the latter case (that of the Conyers bill) the legislation languished in a House committee even though it was co-sponsored by 88 members of Congress. Committee assignments are, thus, a serious bottleneck to democracy in our present Republic.

As for the upset in Massachusetts, I would suggest that local events are best understood in terms of the concrete circumstances obtaining locally and influencing local votes. Despite the fact that, in terms of registered voters in the state, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a 3-1 margin, independents outnumbered both, being 51 percent of the state's electorate.

According to Bloomberg News, "Local issues also influenced the Massachusetts race, including...abuse-of-power scandals surrounding the state’s Democratic Party. 'It’s much more local,' said Jennifer Duffy, the Senate analyst at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report in Washington.

"Perhaps most importantly, the Coakley campaign failed to take the threat from Brown seriously. Coakley opened two district offices to Brown’s five and she kept a far lighter schedule of campaign events.

" 'She thought the election was won,' said Edwin Betancourt, 39, a Boston Democrat who voted for Brown."

None of this negates Mr. Talton's apt observations, which held (correctly) that had the Obama administration been able to claim clear and definite accomplishments greater than "things would have been worse without us", the political equity possessed by the Democrats, sensibly applied, would have been able to overcome local factors in the Massachusetts race.